Nah, don’t bother with a level 1, whatever you’ve got is fine. A Heart Scale would be nice though.
I’ll hop on in at about 15 minutes (6:45 for me, what timezone are you?) and just hang around for a bit. If I don’t respond immediately, give me a minute or two. I’m at my parent’s house taking care of the dog and he’s a bit… ill this weekend.
Done and done. Thanks a lot Drew.
I like the nicknames, especially Flower for a Stunky. The best I come up with is Belle for a Zubat. Bats in the belfry! Har har! 
Also, thanks for the berries. If I would’ve known, I’d given you a few. I have plenty of the resistance berries that reduce damage from X-type attacks. In SS and HG, you can send your mom some of your winnings and occasionally she’ll spend it nice stuff like the rarer berries. I also have plenty on my Pearl game, along with much rarer Pokemon. If you need to borrow something like Deoxys or Regigigas to fill out your Pokedex, we can do a quick back and forth.
You are welcome to the berries. I thingk I’ve lost track of what I’ve got growing and what I have.
I don’t think I’m in need of anything right now, but if you ever want to set something up, feel free to hit me up here, send me a PM or even an e-mail from the address in my profile.
My Zubat’s names are Bruce, Kirk, and Squeak.
I finally located a copy of Pokemon Sapphire yesterday, completing my retro-set of the GBA games. Woohoo!
Am I correct in assuming you can breed additional copies of Starter Pokemon using Ditto?
Yup. Ditto is… versatile. 
But if you have a female of whatever you’re trying to make, its best to use her and a male from the same egg group so that it’ll inherit moves from the father, sometimes including ones it couldn’t learn normally. The Bulbapedia page is useful (but Bulbapedia has been down for the last day or so), but you could also use the serebii.net page. Harder to find what you’re looking for, but it still has all the relevant info.
My understanding is female versions of starters are hard to come by?
Yeah, something like 1/8 are female, either from picking one at the beginning of the game, or from breeding. Since starters are valuable enough trade fodder (and pretty good Pokemon), though, you’ll probably want to breed a bunch and you’ll naturally end up with a few females, which are slightly more valuable than usual, on your own.
A question about friend codes, then, while this thread is still active - are the friend codes associated with the DS, with the particular copy of the game, or with the particular save file?
Either with the copy of the game or the save file. I can trade between my copies of Silver and Pearl with the latter being on someone else’s DS that had never been used for the game before. If you want to get a more specific answer, check your code then delete your save file and start a new game to find out.
(If I had to guess, though, I’d say the code goes with the save and is probably related to the trainer ID. The games seem to base a lot of calculations off of that, like whether a given Pokemon is shiny or its IVs.)
One wonders, then, how the trainer ID is determined. 
Hey, a question I can answer without referring to my young expert, since I had to help with friend code disaster following his first DS’s untimely demise. And by the time the second one was replaced, I had the answers down pat.
The friend code is a function of the save file and the particular physical DS. If you move your game cart to a new DS, your friend code won’t work over WiFi anymore.
Do not be fooled by the fact that you can trade or battle between DS’s that are right next to each other. You can move your game cart from DS1 to DS2, and then trade or battle with no damage to the friend code, as long as you’re not using WiFi. The games have a “local” place to battle and a different place to battle over WiFi. I think the distinction is being “upstairs” vs. being “downstairs” in the game.
So – move your cart from DS1 to DS2 and engage in local battle with another DS? No problem. Engage in battle or trade using WiFi with a remote person? The old friend code won’t work, and you’ll get a message that says you’re in the wrong DS and giving you the option to zap your old code and start with a fresh one.
Incidentally, I’ll share the other thing I have some personal expertise in: WEP vs. WPA.
The new DSi and DSiXL models support WPA WiFi encryption. This is a good thing, because the WEP standard for WiFi is a useless joke, security-wise.
However, Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, HeartGold, and SoulSilver all require WEP encryption in order to work. They do not, in other words, simply work with whatever the DS can support. So you can use your DSi to browse the Internet, or download DSWare, using a WiFi hotspot that’s protected with WPA. But if you wish to trade or battle in the Pokemon world, you must use a WiFi connection that has WEP (or no encryption at all).
This caused a fair bit of drama in the Bricker household, because my initial response to my son was, “Too bad. No way I am standing up a WEP access point.”
Well, guess who won that battle?
So I ended up buying a separate AP, setting up WEP on it, and connecting it to a separate VLAN on my network, that routed to the main network only when the destination IP networks were white-listed. I stood up a dual-homed Linux box that handled the routing. So if someone were to break the pathetic WEP encryption, they would find their traffic can only go to Nintendo’s IP ranges.
I ended up moving that functionality onto a VM on my ESXi host, but still: the cost to securely support my kid’s desire to trade and battle with his friends was non-trivial.
Ahh. And I bet local trades and battles don’t require the friend code, then.
Too true. I have actually made two configurations for my wireless router - I can swap in WEP if I need to do something with the DS, then put WPA back on it when I’m done.
Bricker- You’re right, I was ‘upstairs’ trading, not using the WiFi. As for the security issues, it was a huge pain for me too. I know very little about security and the needs of different programs, but it would seem pretty simple to just use WPA for everything. All of the things you can do over WiFi are just trading data. What makes it so special that it can’t be treated like the DSWare or Internet?
Right, although they do have code that checks to see if the local partner already exists in your list of friends and asks your permission to add them if they do not. But it doesn’t use or need a friend code to “see” them.
If I had to guess, I’d say there’s nothing special about it… just the decision to put the code for connecting to WiFi on the cart instead of just letting the DS expose an API-like interface and having every game use that. I think that’s the direction Nintendo is going now with the DSi, and I will bet that when Black and White come out, they’ll be “modular” rather than having their own code.
Bricker Jr is fairly dancing with anticipation about Black and White, by the way.
I can’t find anything on Serebii about ID, and Bulbapedia is similarly unhelpful. My only guess is that the random number generator does it, maybe using the system time/date as the seed.
But here’s an example of how it’s used in the calculation for shininess that I mentioned earlier.
Bricker-Can Jr get his hands on a Chimchar or Torchic? And if so, is he interested in a Cyndaquil or Charmander? (Or anything else, for that matter?)
I have a torchic I can give you if he can’t get you one. This weekend is insanely busy but next week we can do our trades.
I have a few Cyndaquil if you need one, while the Paras is ready to go. I’ll just leave it at lvl 16, in case you want to do some EV training with it. Its only a few hundred exp to the next level anyways. As for when next week, just tell me whenever. I’m usually pretty free in the evening any day but Fri and Sat.